Surprising Finds from the Independent Art Fair

Hornet’s Nest, Enrico David, 2013, from Michael Werner Gallery. Photo courtesy of the artist and Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London

The Independent art fair, now in its fifth year, returned to Manhattan last week amid the city's annual art-show bonanza. Spread across several floors of what was once the Dia Art Foundation building, on West 22nd Street, the event brought together more than 50 dealers. True to the fair’s name, their offerings tended toward the bold and the surprising, from Etienne Chambaud's heavily oxidized paintings to Jessica Warboys’s unstretched canvases, the vivid abstractions of which were achieved by soaking the pigmented cloths in the ocean surf.